The next day by noon—still raining—I was at Pau; and having bidden adieu to M. Martin, started for Bagnerre de Bigorre by Tarbes, the great centre of Pyrenean locomotion. Here, as at Bordeaux, you are on ancient English ground. The rich plain all around you is the old County of Bigorre, which was given up to England as portion of the ransom of King John of France; and here to Tarbes came, with a gallant train, the Black Prince, to visit the Count of Argmanac—the celebrated Gaston Phœbus, Count of Foix—leaving his strong Castle of Orthon, to be present at the solemnity. The life and soul of Tarbes now consist of the scores of small cross-country diligences, which start in every direction from it as a common centre. The main feature of the town is a huge square, nine-tenths of the houses being glaring white-washed hotels, with messageries on the groundfloors. Diligences by the score lie scattered around; and every now and then the dogs'-meat old horses who draw them go stalking solemnly across the square beneath the stunted lime-trees. There is an adult population of conductors, with silver ear-rings, and their hands in their pockets, always lounging about; and a juvenile population of shoe-blacks, who swarm out upon you, and take your legs by storm. Tarbes is the best place—excepting, perhaps, Arles—for getting your boots blacked, I ever visited. If you were a centipede, and had fifty pairs of Wellingtons, they would all be shining like mirrors in a trice. How these boys live, I cannot make out, unless, indeed, upon the theory that they black their shoes mutually, and keep continually paying each other. Bagnerre is about sixteen miles distant; and a mountain of a diligence, not so much laden with luggage as freighted with a cargo, conveyed me there in not much under four hours; and I repaired—it was dusk, and, of course, raining—to the Hotel de France—one of the huge caravansaries common at watering-places. A buxom lass opened the wicket in the Porte Cochere.
"I can have a room?"
"Oh, plenty!"
And we stepped into the open court-yard. The great hotel rose on two sides, and a small corps de logis on the two others.
"Wait," said the girl, "until I get the key."
And off she tripped. The key! Was the house shut up? Even so. I was to have a place as big as a hospital to myself. The door opened; all was darkness and a fusty smell. The last family had been gone a fortnight. Our footsteps echoed like Marianne's. It was decidedly a foreign edition, uncarpeted and waxy-smelling, of the "Moated Grange." I was ushered into a really splendid suite of rooms—of a decidedly grander nature than I ever occupied before, or ever occupied since.
"The price is the price of an ordinary bedroom. Monsieur may choose whatever room he pleases; and the table-d'hôte bell rings at six."
This, at all events, was reassuring. Then my conductress retreated; the doors banged behind her, and I felt like a man shut up in St. Peter's. The silence in the house was dreadful. I was fool enough to go and listen at the door: dead, solemn silence—a vault could not be stiller. I would have given something handsome for a cat, or even a mouse; a parrot would have been invaluable—it would have shouted and screamed. But no; the hush of the place was like the Egyptian darkness—it was a thick silence, which could be felt. At length the table-d'hôte bell rang. The salle à manger was in the building across the yard. Thither I repaired, and found a room, or rather a long corridor, big enough to dine a Freemason's or London Tavern party, with a miraculously long table, tapering away into the distance. Upon a few square feet of this table was a patch of white cloth; and upon the patch of cloth one plate, one knife and fork, and one glass. This was the table-d'hôte, and, like Handel, "I was de kombany."
Next day the weather was no better; but I was desperate, and sallied out in utter defiance of the rain; but such a dreary little city as Bagnerre, in that wintry day, was never witnessed. I never was at Herne Bay in November, nor have I ever passed a Christmas at Margate; but Bagnerre gave me a lively notion of the probable delights of the dead season at either of these favourite watering-places. The town seemed defunct, and lying there passively to be rained on. Half the houses are lodging-places and hotels; and they were all shut up—ponderous green outside shutters dotting the dirty white of the walls. Hardly a soul was stirring; but ducks quacked manfully in the kennels, and two or three wretched donkeys—dreary relics of the season—stood with their heads together under the lime-trees in the Place. I retreated into a café. If there were nobody in France but the last man, you would find him in a café, making his own coffee, and playing billiards with himself. Here the room was tolerably crowded; and I got into conversation with a group of townspeople round the white Fayence stove. I abused the weather—never had seen such weather—might live a century in England, and not have such a dreary spell of rain—and so forth. The anxiety of the good people to defend the reputation of their climate was excessive. They were positively frightened at the prospect of a word being breathed in England against the skies of the Pyrenees in general, and those of Bagnerre in particular. The oldest inhabitant was appealed to, as never having remembered such weather at Bagnerre. As for the summer, it had been more than heavenly. All the springs were delightful; the autumns were invariably charming; and the winters, if possible, the best of the four. The present rain was extraordinary—exceptional—a sort of phenomenon, like a comet or a calf with two heads. One of these worthies, understanding that however strong my objections were to fog and drizzle, I was not by any means afraid of being melted, recommended me to make my way to the Palombiere, and see them catch wild pigeons, after a fashion only practised there and at one other place in the Pyrenees. Not appalled, then, by the prospect of a three-mile pull up-hill, I made my way through the narrow suburban streets, and across the foaming Adour, here a glorious mountain-stream, but already made useful to turn numerous flour-mills, and to drive the saws and knives by which the beautiful marble of the Pyrenees is cut and polished. Hereabouts, in the straggling suburbs, the whole female and juvenile population were clustered, just within the shelter of the open doors, knitting those woollen jackets, scarfs, and so forth, which are so much in vogue amongst the visitors in the season. There was one graceful group of pretty girls, the eldest not more than four years of age, pursuing the work in a shed open to the street, seated round a loom, at which a good-natured-looking fellow was operating.
"That is a beautiful scarf," I said to the girl next me; "how much will they give you for making it?"
The weaver paused in his work at this question. "Tell the gentleman, my dear, how much Messieurs So-and-so give for knitting that scarf."
"Two liards," said the little girl.
Two liards, or half a solitary sous! This was worse than the shirt-makers at home.
"It is a bad trade now," said the weaver. "She is a child; but the best hands can't make more than big sous where they once made francs; but all the trades of the poor are going to the devil. I don't think there will be any poor left in twenty years—they will be all starved before then."
This led to a long talk with my new friend, who was a poor, mild, meek sort of man—a thinker, after his fashion, totally uninstructed—he could neither read nor write—and a curious specimen of the odd twists which unregulated and unintelligent ponderings sometimes give a man's mind. His grand notion seemed to be, that whatever might be the isolated crimes and horrors now and then committed upon the earth, the most terrible and malignant species of perverted human ingenuity was—the employment of running streams to work looms.
"Was water made to weave cloth?" he asked. "Did the power that formed the Adour intend its streams to be made use of to deprive an honest man of his daily bread? He would uncommonly like to find the orator who would make that clear to his mind. It was terrible to see how men perverted the gifts of Nature! How could I, or any one else, prove to him that the water beside us was intended to take the place of men's arms and fingers, and to be used, as if it were vital blood, to manufacture the garments of those who lived upon its banks?"
I ventured to hint, that running water might occasionally be put to analogous, yet by no means so objectionable uses; and I instanced the flour and maize mill, which was working merrily within a score of paces of us. For a moment, but for a moment only, my antagonist was staggered. Then recovering himself, he inquired triumphantly whether I meant to say that the process of grinding corn was like the process of weaving cloth? It was curious to observe the confusion in the man's mind between analogy and resemblance. As I could not but admit that the two operations were conducted quite in a different fashion, my gratified opponent, not to be too hard upon me, warily changed the immediate subject of conversation. I was not a native of this part of France? Not a native of France at all? Then I came from some place far away? Perhaps from across the sea? From England! Ah! well, indeed, there was an English lady married, about five miles off—Madame——. Of course I knew her? No? Well, that was odd. He would have thought that, coming from the same place, I ought to know her. However—were there many handloom weavers like himself in England? No, very few indeed. What! did they weave by water-power there, too? were the folks as bad as some of the people in his country? I explained that, not being so much favoured in the way of water-privilege, the people of England had resorted to steam.
The poor weaver was quite overcome at this crowning proof of human malignity. It was more horrible even than the water-atrocities of the Pyrenees.
"Steam!"—he repeated the word a dozen times over, shaking his head mournfully at each iteration,—"Steam! Ah, well, what is this poor unhappy world coming to?"
Then rousing himself, and sending the shuttle rattling backwards and forwards through the web, he added heartily: "After all, their moving iron and wood will never make the good, substantial, well-wearing cloth woven by honest, industrious flesh and blood."
Who would have the heart to prescribe cold political economy in such a case? I left the good man busily pursuing his avocation, and lamenting over the perversity of making broad-cloth by the aid of boiling water.
Stretching manfully up hill, by a path like the bed of a muddy torrent, I was rewarded by a sudden watery blink of sunshine. Then the wind began to blow, and vast rolling masses of mist to move before it. From a high ridge, with vast green slopes, all dotted with sheep, spreading away beneath until they blended with the corn-land on the plain, Bagnerre appeared, the great white hotels peeping from the trees, and the whole town lying as it were at the bottom of a bowl. It must be fearfully hot in summer, when the sun shines right down into the amphitheatre, and the high hills about, deaden every breeze. At present, however, the wind was rising to a gale, and blowing the heavy clouds right over the Pyrenees. Attaining a still greater height, the scene was very grand. On one side was a confused sea of mountain-peaks and ridges, over which floated masses of wreathing fog, flying like chased phantoms before the northern wind. Now a mountain-top would be submerged in the mist, to re-appear again in a moment. Anon I would get a glimpse of a long vista of valley, which next minute would be a mass of grey nonentity. The mist-wreaths rose and rolled beneath me and above me. Sometimes I would be enveloped as in a dense white smoke; then the fog-bank would flee away, ascending the broad breast of the hill before me, and wrapping trees, and rocks, and pastures in its shroud. All this time the wind blew a gale, and roared among the wrestling pines. Sometimes the sun looked out, and lit with fiery splendour the rolling masses of the fog, with some partial patch of landscape; and, altogether, the effect, the constant movement of the mist, the wild, hilly landscape appearing and disappearing, the glimpses occasionally vouchsafed of the distant plain of Gascony, sometimes dimly seen through the driving vapours, sometimes golden bright in a partial blaze of sunshine,—all this was very striking and fine. At length, however, I reached the Palombiere, situated upon the ridge of the hill—which cost a good hour and a half's climb. Here grow a long row of fine old trees, and on the northern side rise two or three very high, mast-like trees of liberty, notched so as to allow a boy as supple and as sure-footed as a monkey to climb to the top, and ensconce himself in a sort of cage, like the "crow's nest" which whalers carry at their mast-heads, for the look-out. I found the fowlers gathered in a hovel at the foot of a tree; they said the wind was too high for the pigeons to be abroad; but for a couple of francs they offered to make believe that a flock was coming, and shew me the process of catching. The bargain made, away went one of the urchins up the bending pole, into the crow's-nest—a feat which I have a great notion the smartest topman in all Her Majesty's navy would have shirked, considering that there were neither foot-ropes or man-ropes to hold on by. Then, on certain cords being pulled, a whole screen of net rose from tree to tree, so that all passage through the row was blocked.
"Now," said the chief pigeon-catcher, "the birds at this season come flying from the north to go to Spain, and they keep near the tops of the hills. Well, suppose a flock coming now; they see the trees, and will fly over them—if it wasn't for the pigeonier."
"The pigeonier! what is that?"
"We're going to show you." And he shouted to the boy in the crow's nest, "Now Jacques!"
Up immediately sprang the urchin, shouting like a possessed person—waving his arms, and at length launching into the air a missile which made an odd series of eccentric flights, like a bird in a fit.
"That is the pigeonier," said the fowler; "it breaks the flight of the birds, and they swoop down and dash between the trees—so."
He gave a tug to a short cord, and immediately the wall of nets, which was balanced with great stones, fell in a mass to the ground.
"Monsieur will be good enough to imagine that the birds are struggling and fluttering in the meshes."
At Bagnerre there is a marble work—that of M. Géruset—which I recommend every body to visit, not to see marble cut, although that is interesting, but to pay their respects to, I believe, the grandest dog in all the world—a giant even among the canine giants of the Pyrenees. I have seen many a calf smaller than that magnificent fellow, who, as you enter the yard, will rise from his haunches, like a king from his throne, and, walking up to you with a solemn magnificence of step which is perfect, will wag his huge tail, and lead you—you cannot misunderstand the invitation—to the counting-house door. For vastness of brow and jaw—enormous breadth and depth of chest, and girth of limb, I never saw this creature equalled. The biggest St. Bernard I ever came across was almost a puppy to him. A tall man may lay his hand on the dog's back without the least degree of stoop; and the animal could not certainly stand erect under an ordinary table.
"I suppose," I said to the clerk who showed me the works, "you have had many offers for that dog?"
"My employer," he replied, "has refused one hundred pounds for him. But, even if we wished, we could not dispose of him: he is fond of the place and the people here; so that, though we might sell him, he wouldn't go with his new master; and I would like to see any four men in Bagnerre try to force him."
That evening I fortunately did not include the whole company at the table-d'hôte. There was a young gentleman very much jewelled, and an elderly lady also very strongly got up in the way of brooches and bracelets, to whom the young gentleman was paying very assiduous but very forced attention. The lady was sulky, and sent plat after plat untasted away; and when her companion, as I thought, whispered a remonstrance, she snubbed him in great style; at which he bit his lip, turned all manner of colours, and then got moodily silent. I suspected that the young gentleman had married the old lady for her money, and was leading just as comfortable a life as he deserved. But, besides them, we had a couple of the gentlemen who are to be more or less found in every hotel in France—commis voyageurs, or commercial travellers. By the way, the aristocratic Murray lays his hand, or rather his "Hand-book," heavily about the ears of these gentlemen—castigating them a good deal in the Croker style, and with more ferocity than justice: "A more selfish, depraved, and vulgar, if not brutal set, does not exist;" "English gentlemen will take good care to keep at a distance from them," and "English ladies will be cautious of presenting themselves at a French table-d'hôte, except"—in certain cases specified. Now, I agree with Mr. Murray, that commercial travellers, French and English, are not distinguished by much polish of manner, or elegance of address; on the contrary, the style of their proceedings at table is frequently slovenly and coarse, and their talk is almost invariably "shop." In a word, they are not educated people, or gentlemen. But when we come to such expressions as "selfish, brutal, and depraved," I think most English travellers in France will agree with me, that the aristocratic hand-book maker is going more than a little too far. I have met scores of clever and intelligent commis voyageurs—hundreds of affable, good-humoured ones—thousands of decent, inoffensive ones. In company with a lady, I have dined at every species of table-d'hôte, in every species of hotel, from the Channel to the Mediterranean, and the Bay of Biscay to the Alps, and I cannot call to mind one instance of rudeness, or voluntary want of civility, from one end of our journey to the other; while scores and scores of instances of attention and kindness—more particularly when it was ascertained that my companion was in weak health—come thronging on me. I know that the French commis voyageur looks after his own interest at table pretty sharply, and also that he is quite deficient in all the elegant little courtesies of society; but to say that he is brutal or depraved, because he is not a petit maître and an elegant, is neither true nor courteous. If there be any set of Frenchmen to whose conduct at table-d'hôtes strong expressions may be fairly applied, it is French officers, who sprung from a rank often inferior to that of the bagman, and, with all the coarseness of the barracks clinging to them, frequently cluster together in groups of half-a-dozen—scramble for all that is good upon the table—eat with their caps on, which the commis voyageur only does in winter, when the bare and empty salle is miserably cold—and in general behave with a coarse rudeness, and a tumultuous vulgarity, which I never saw private soldiers guilty of, either here or in France.
But I must hurry my Pyrenean sketches to an end. The true South—I mean the Mediterranean-washed provinces—still lie before me; and I must perforce leap almost at a bound over a long and interesting journey through the little-known towns of the eastern Pyrenees—quiet, sluggish, tumble-down places, as St. Gaudens, St. Girons, and St. Foix, possessed neither of pump-rooms, nor warm-springs, but vegetating on, lazily and dreamily, in their glorious climate—for, after all, it does sometimes stop raining, and that for a few blazing months at a time, too. I would like to sketch St. Gaudens, with its broad-eaved, booth-like shops, and the snug town-hall, with pictures of old prefects and wigged fermiers generaux, into which they introduced me, and where they set all their municipal documents before me, when I applied for some information as to the landholding of the district. I would like to sketch at length a curious walled village on the head waters of the Garonne—a dead-and-gone sort of place, of which I asked an old man the name. "A poor place, sir," he said; "a poor place. Not worth your while looking at. All poor people here, sir—poor people; not worth your while speaking to. And the name—oh, a poor name, sir—not worth your while knowing; but, if you insist—why, then, it's Valentine." I would like to sketch the merry population in the hills round that dead-and-gone village—half farmers, half weavers, like the Saddleworth peasants, in Yorkshire—a jolly set—all sporting men, too, who give up their looms, and go into the woods after bears as boldly as Sir Peter de Bearne. And I would like, too, to try to bring before my reader's eye the viney valley of the Ariege, and the deep ravines through which the stream goes foaming, spanned by narrow bridges, each with a tower in the centre, where the warder kept his guard, and opened and shut the huge, iron-bound doors, and dropped and raised the portcullis at pleasure. And these old feudal memorials bring me to the castles and ruined towers so thickly peopling the land where lived the bands of adventurers, as Froissart calls them, by whom the fat citizens of the towns were wont to be "guerroyés et harriés," and most of which have still their legends of desperate sieges, and, too often, of foul murders done within their dreary walls. Pass, as I perforce must, however, and gain Provence—there is yet one legendary tale I cannot help telling. It is one of the best things in Froissart, and a little twisting would give it a famous satiric significance against a class of bores of our own day and generation. It relates to the lord of a castle not far from Tarbes, and was told to Froissart by a squire, "in a corner of the chapel of Orthez," during the visit paid by the canon to Gaston Phœbus, Count of Foix—who, I am sorry to say, has been puffed, and most snobbishly exalted by the great chronicler into the ranks of the most noble chivalry, in return for splendid entertainment bestowed; whereas, in fact, Gaston Phœbus was a reckless murderer, possessed of neither faith nor honour. But, alas, the Canon of Chimay sometimes descended into the lowest depths of penny-a-lining, and "coloured" the cases just as a bribed police reporter does when a "respectable" gentleman gets into trouble. Gaston stabbed his son to death, in a dungeon; and the bold Froissart has actually the coolness to assert that the death of the heir took place, inasmuch as his father, in a rage, because he would not eat the dainties placed before him, struck him with his clenched fist, holding therein a knife with which he had been picking his nails, but the blade of which, says the lame apologist, only protruded a "groat's breadth" from his fingers,—the result being that the steel unfortunately happened to cut a vein in young Gaston's throat. The simple truth of the matter is, that the count was jealous of his son's being a favourite of the boy's mother, from whom he (the count) was separated—that he dreaded lest the wrongs of his wife might be avenged by her brother, the King of Navarre—and that he determined to starve the boy in a dungeon; but the child not dying so soon as was expected, his father went very coolly in to him, and cut his throat.
"To speak briefly and truly," says Froissart, "the Count de Foix was perfect in body and mind, and no contemporary prince could be compared to him for sense, honour, and liberality."
"To speak briefly and truly, Sir John Froissart," I reply, "you have written a charming and chivalrous chronicle; but you could take a bribe with any man of your time, and having done so, you could attempt to deceive posterity, and write down what you knew to be a lie, with as gallant a grace and easy swagger as the great Mr. Jonathan Wild himself."
However, there are black spots in the sun—to the legend which I promised. The Lord of Corasse—a castle, by the way, in which Henri Quatre passed some portion of his boyish days—the Lord of Corasse had a quarrel touching tithes with a neighbouring priest, who being unable to obtain his dues by ordinary legal or illegal remedies, sent a spirit to haunt the castle of Corasse. This spirit proceeded to perform his mission by making a dreadful hallabuloo all night long, and breaking the crockery—so that very soon the Lord and Lady of Corasse had to dine without platters. At length, however, the Baron managed to come to speaking terms with the demon, who was invisible, and found out that his name was Orthon, and that the priest had sent him.
"But Orthon, my good fellow," said the sly Lord of Corasse, "this priest is a poor devil, and will never be able to pay you handsomely. Throw him overboard at once, therefore, and come and take service with me."
Orthon must have been the most fickle of all the devils, for he not only acceded to the proposition with astonishing readiness, but took such an affection to his new lord, that he could not be got out of his bedroom at night, to the sore discomfiture of the baroness, "who was so much frightened that the hairs of her head stood on end, and she always hid herself under the bed-clothes;" while the too familiar demon, never seen, but only heard, insisted on keeping his friend, the baron, chatting all night. But the charms of Orthon's conversation at length palled, particularly as they kept the baron night after night from his natural rest; so he took to despatching the demon all over Europe, collecting information for him of all that was going on in the courts and councils of princes, and at the scene of war where there happened to be fighting. Still, as Orthon moved as fast as a message by electric telegraph, the baron found him nearly as troublesome as ever. He was eternally coming in with intelligence which he insisted upon telling, until the Lord of Corasse's head was fairly turned by the amount of news he was obliged to listen to. Never had there been so indefatigable an agent. He would have been invaluable to a newspaper—but he was boring the Lord of Corasse to death.
A loud thunder at the door at midnight. The baron would groan, for he knew well who was the claimant for admission. "Let me in, Let me in. I have news for thee from Hungary or England," as the case might be; and the baron, groaning in soul and body, would get up and let the demon in; while the latter would immediately commence his recitation:
"Let me sleep. Let me sleep, for Heaven's sake!" the victim would exclaim.
"I have not told thee half the news," would be Orthon's reply; "I will not let thee sleep until I have told thee the news;" and he would go on with his budget of foreign intelligence till the day scared him, and left the baron and the baronness to broken and unrefreshing slumbers.
Froissart narrates that at length the demon consented to appear in a visible form to the baron; that he took the shape of a lean sow, upon which the Lord of Corasse ordered the dogs to be let loose upon the animal, which straightway disappeared, and Orthon was never seen after. I suspect, however, that Sir John was hoaxed in this respect. He clearly did not see the fun of the story, which is very capable of being resolved into an allegory—the fact being that the demon was some gentleman of the priest's acquaintance, with supernatural powers of boring whom he let loose upon the recalcitrant tithe-payer, until the arrears were at length paid up. The sow which disappeared was clearly no other than a tithe-pig.
Again in the banquette of the diligence, which, rolling on the great highway from Toulouse to Marseilles, has taken me up at Carcassone, and will deposit me for the present at Beziers. We have entered in Languedoc, the most early civilised of the provinces which now make up France—the land where chivalry was first wedded to literature—the land whose tongue laid the foundations of the greater part of modern poetry—the land where the people first rebelled against the tyranny of Rome—the land of the Menestrals and the Albigenses. People are apt to think of this favoured tract of Europe as a sort of terrestrial paradise—one great glowing odorous garden—where, in the shade of the orange and the olive-tree, queens of love and beauty, crowned the heads of wandering Troubadours. The literary and historic associations have not unnaturally operated upon our common notions of the country; and for the "South of France," we are very apt to conjure up a brave, fictitious landscape. Yet this country is no Eden. It has been admirably described, in a single phrase, the "Austere South of France." It is austere—grim—sombre. It never smiles: it is scathed and parched. There is no freshness or rurality in it. It does not seem the country, but a vast yard—shadeless, glaring, drear, and dry. Let us glance from our elevated perch over the district we are traversing. A vast, rolling wilderness of clodded earth, browned and baked by the sun; here and there masses of red rock heaving themselves above the soil like protruding ribs of the earth, and a vast coating of drowthy dust, lying like snow upon the ground. To the left, a long ridge of iron-like mountains—on all sides rolling hills, stern and kneaded, looking as though frozen. On the slopes and in the plains, endless rows of scrubby, ugly trees, powdered with the universal dust, and looking exactly like mopsticks. Sprawling and straggling over the soil beneath them, jungles of burnt-up, leafless bushes, tangled, and apparently neglected. The trees are olives and mulberries—the bushes, vines.
Glance again across the country. It seems a solitude. Perhaps one or two distant figures, grey with dust, are labouring to break the clods with wooden hammers; but that is all. No cottages—no farmhouses—no hedges—all one rolling sweep of iron-like, burnt-up, glaring land. In the distance, you may espy a village. It looks like a fortification—all blank, high stone walls, and no windows, but mere loop-holes. A square church tower gloomily and heavily overtops the houses, or the dungeon of an ancient fortress rears its massive pile of mouldering stone. Where have you seen such a landscape before? Stern and forbidding, it has yet a familiar look. These scrubby, mop-headed trees—these formal square lines of huge edifices—these banks and braes, varying in hue from the grey of the dust to the red of the rock—why, they are precisely the back-grounds of the pictures of the renaissance painters of France and Italy.
I was miserably disappointed with the olive. It is one of the romantic trees, full of association. It is a biblical tree, and one of the most favoured of the old eastern emblems. But what claim has it to beauty? The trunk, a weazened, sapless-looking piece of timber, the branches spreading out from it like the top of a mushroom, and the colour, when you can see it for dust, a cold, sombre, greyish green. One olive is as like another as one mopstick is like another. The tree has no picturesqueness—no variety. It is not high enough to be grand, and not irregular enough to be graceful. Put it beside the birch, the beech, the elm, or the oak, and you will see the poetry of the forest and its poorest and most meagre prose. So also, to a great extent, of the mulberry. I had a vague sort of respect for the latter tree, because one of the Champions of Christendom—St. James of Spain, I think—delivered out of the trunk of a mulberry an enchanted princess; but the enforced lodgings of the captive form just as shabby and priggish-looking a tree as the olive. The general shape—that of a mop—is the same, and a mutual want of variety and picturesqueness, afflict, with the curse of hopeless ugliness, both silk and oil-trees. The fig, in another way, is just as bad. It is a sneaking tree, which appears as if it were growing on the sly, while its soft, buttery-looking branches—bending and twisting, swollen and unwholesome-looking—put you somehow in mind of diseased limbs, which the quack doctors call "bad legs." In fact, it seems as if the climate and soil of Provence and Languedoc were utterly unfavourable to the production of forest scenery. One of our noble clumps of oak, beech, birch, and elm, at home, is worth, for splendid picturesqueness and rich luxuriance of greenery, every fig-tree which ever grew since fig-leaves were in vogue; every olive which ever grew since the dove from the ark plucked off a branch; and every mulberry which ever grew since St. James of Spain cut out the imprisoned princess. The menestrals of Languedoc no doubt gave our early bards many a poetic lesson; but I can imagine the hopeless stare of the Southern when the Northern rhymer, in return, would chant him a jolly Friar of Copmanhurst sort of stave about the "merry greenwood," and the joys of the "greenwood tree."
As we roll along the dusty highway, intersecting the dusty fields, the dusty olives, and the dusty vines, I pray the reader to glance to the right, towards the summit of a chain of jagged, naked hills. These go by the name of the Black Mountains—a good "Mysteries of Udolpho" sort of title—and they form part of a range which separates the basin of the streams which descend to the north, and form the head waters of the Garonne, and those which descend to the south, and form the head waters of the Aude. Somewhere about 1670, the scattered shepherds who dwelt in these hills frequently observed a stranger, richly dressed, attended by two labouring-looking men, who paid him great reverence. The little party toiled up and down in the hills, and frequently erected and gathered round magical-looking instruments. "Holy Mary!" said the peasants, "they are sorcerers, and they are come to bewitch us all!" For years and years did the richly dressed man and the two labourers haunt the Black Mountains, wandering uneasily up and down, climbing ridges, and plunging into valleys, and always seeming to seek something which they could not find. At length, upon a glaring hot summer day, they came suddenly upon a young peasant, who was quenching his thirst at a fountain.
The cavalier glanced at the spring, and caught the shepherd by his home-spun jacket. The boy thought he was going to be murdered, and screamed out; but a Louis-d'or quieted him in a moment. Then the cavalier, trembling with anxiety, exclaimed: "What fountain is this?"
"The fountain of the Greve," said the boy.
"And it runs both ways along the ridge of the hill?"
"Ay; any fool may see that half of the water goes north, and half goes south—any fool knows that."
"And I only discovered it now. Thank God!"
We shall see who the cavalier, the discoverer of the fountain of the Greve, was, when we arrive at Beziers. Meantime the reader may be astonished that, after the cold frost and snow of the Pyrenees, a week or two later in the season brought me into a region of dry parched land, the sky blue and speckless from dawn to twilight—the sun glaringly hot, and the flying dust penetrating into the very pores of the skin. But we have left the mist-gathering and rain-attracting mountains, and we have entered the "austere South," where the sky for months and months is cloudless as in Arabia—where, at the season I traversed it, the sun being hot by day does not prevent the frost from being keen at night; and where the mistral, or north wind, nips your skin as with knives; while in every sheltered spot the noon-day heat bakes and scorches it. But such is Languedoc.
As the evening closed in, we saw, duskily crowning a hill before us, a clustered old city, with grand cathedral towers, and many minor church steeples, cutting the darkening air. This is Beziers, where took place the crowning massacre of the Albigenses—the most learned, intellectual, and philosophic of the early revolters from the Church of Rome, and whom it is a perfect mistake to consider in the light of mere peasant fanatics, like the Camisards or the Vaudois. In this ancient city, beneath the shadow of these dim towers, more than twenty thousand men, women, and children, were slaughtered by the troops of orthodox France and Rome, led on and incited to the work by the Bishop of Beziers, one of the most black-souled bigots who ever deformed God's earth. When the soldiers could hardly distinguish in the darkness the heretics from the orthodox—although, indeed, they might have solved the problem by cutting down every intelligent man they saw—the loving pastor of souls roared out, "Cœdite omnes, cœdite; noverit enim Dominus qui sunt ejus!" It is to be fervently hoped, that, for the sake of the Bishop of Beziers, a certain other personage has long ago proved himself equally perspicuous and discriminating.
We pulled up at Hotel du Nord, at Beziers, just as the table-d'hôte bell was ringing; and I speedily found myself sitting down in a most gaily lighted salon, to a capital dinner, in the midst of a merry company. For the last ten miles of the way, I had been amusing myself by catching glimpses of a distant lighthouse; for I knew that it shone from a headland jutting into the Mediterranean. And the first glance at the Mediterranean was now my grand object of interest, as the first glance at the Pyrenees had been; and as, I remember, long ago, the first glance of France, of the Rhine, and the Alps, had each their turn. When, therefore, a dish of soles (stewed in oil, as the Jews cook them here—and the Jews are the only people in England who can cook soles,) was placed before me, I asked the waiter where the fish came from?
"Mais, monsieur, where should they come from, but from the sea?"
"You mean the Mediterranean?"
"Mais certainment, monsieur; there is no sea but the Mediterranean sea."
An observation which, coinciding with my own mental view for the moment, I quietly agreed in.
In the market-place of Beziers stands the statue of a thoughtful and handsome man, dressed in the costume of the early period of Louis Quatorze, with flowing love-locks and peaked beard. His cloak has fallen unheeded from his shoulders, as he eagerly gazes on the ground—one hand holding a compass, the other a pencil. This is the statue of Pierre Paul Riquet, feudal seigneur of Bonrepos, and the cavalier who discovered the fountain of the Greve. That fountain solved a mighty problem—the possibility of connecting, by means of water communication, the Atlantic and the Mediterranean—the Garonne flowing into the one, with the Aude flowing into the other; and the formation of the Canal du Midi, doubled at a stroke the value of the Mediterranean provinces of France. Francis I., although our James called him a "mere fechting fule," dreamt of this. Henri and Sully projected the scheme; but it was only under Louis and Colbert that it was executed; and the bold and resolute engineer—he lived three quarters of a century before Brindley—was Pierre Paul Riquet. This man was one of those chivalric enthusiasts for a scheme—one of those gallant soldiers of an idea—who give up their lives to the task of making a thought a fact. He had laboured at least a dozen of weary years ere the court took up the plan. He had demonstrated the thing again and again to commissioners of notabilities, ere the first stone of the first loch was laid. The work went on; twelve thousand "navvies" laboured at the task; Riquet had sunk his entire fortune in it. In thirteen years, the toil was all but accomplished. In the coming summer the Canal du Midi would be opened—when Riquet died—the great cup of his life's ambition brimming untasted at his lips. Six months thereafter, a gay company of king's commissioners, gracefully headed by Riquet's two sons, rode through the channel of the water-courses from Beziers to Toulouse, and returned the next week by water, leading a jubilant procession of twenty-three great barges, proceeding from the west with cargoes for the annual fair held on the Rhone, at Beaucaire. Since Riquet's days, all his plans have been, one by one, carried out. His canal now runs to Agen, where it joins the Garonne; while at the other end, it is led through the chain of marshes and lagoons which extend along the Mediterranean, from Perpignan to the delta of the Rhone, joining the "swift and arrowy" river at Beaucaire.
I have mentioned the mistral. I had heard a great deal previously about this wind, and while at Beziers, had the pleasure of making its personal acquaintance. This mistral is the plague and the curse of the Mediterranean provinces of France. The ancient historians mention it as sweeping gravel and stones up into the air. St. Paul talks of the south wind, which blew softly until there arose against it a fierce wind, called Euroclydon—certainly the mistral. Madame de Sevigne paints it as "le tourbillon, l'ouregan, tous les diables dechainés qui veulent bien emporter votre chateau;" and my amazement is, that the hurricane does not sometimes carry bodily off, if not a chateau, at least the ricketty villages of the peasants. I had but a taste of this wild, gusty, and most abominably drying and cutting wind; for the gale which blew for a couple of days over Beziers formed, I was told, only a very modified version of the true mistral; but it was quite enough to give a notion of the wind in the full height of its evil powers. The whole country was literally one moving cloud of dust. The roads, so to speak, smoked. From an eminence, you could trace their line for miles by the columns of white powdered earth driven into the air. As for the paths you actually traversed, the ground-down gravel was blown from the ruts, leaving the way scarred, as it were, with ridgy seams, and often worn down to the level of the subsidiary stratum of rock. The streaky, russet-brown of the fields was speedily converted into one uniform grey. Never had I seen anything more intensely or dismally parched up. As for any tree or vegetable but vines and olives—whose very sustenance and support is dust and gravel, thriving under the liability to such visitations—the thing was impossible. Nor was the dust by any means the only evil. The wind seemed poisonous; it made the eyes—mine, at all events—smart and water; cracked the lips, as a sudden alternation from heat to cold will do; caused a little accidentally inflicted scratch to ache and shoot; and finally, dried, hardened, and roughened the skin, until one felt in an absolute fever. The cold in the shade, let it be noted, was intense—a pinching, nipping cold, in noways frosty or kindly; while in sheltered corners the heat was as unpleasant, the blaze of an unclouded sun darting right down upon the parched and gleaming earth. All this, however, I was told, formed but a modified attack of mistral. The true wind mingles with the flying dust a greyish or yellowish haze, through which the sun shines hot, yet cheerless. I had, however, a specimen of the wind, which quite satisfied me, and which certainly enables me to affirm, that the coldest, harshest, and most rheumatic easterly gale which ever whistled the fogs from Essex marshes over the dripping and shivering streets of London, is a genial, balmy, and ambrosial zephyr, compared with the mistral of the ridiculously bepuffed climate of the South of France.
Wandering about Beziers, so as to get the features of the olive country thoroughly into my head, I had a good deal of conversation with the scattered peasantry—a fierce, wild-looking set of people, dressed in the common blouse, but a perfectly different race from the quiet, mild, central and northern agriculturists. Their black, flashing eyes, so brimful of devilry—their wild, straight, black hair, shooting in straggling masses over their shoulders, and the fierce vehemence of gesticulation—the loud, passionate tone of their habitual speech—all mark the fiery and hot-blooded South. Go into a cabaret, into the high, darkened room, set round with tables and benches, and you will think the whole company are in a frantic state of quarrel. Not at all—it is simply their way of conversing. But if a dispute does break out, they leap, and scream, and glare into each other's eyes like demons, and the ready knife is but too often seen gleaming in the air. Here in the South you will note the change in the style of construction of the farmhouses, which are clustered in bourgs. Everything is on a great scale, to give air, the grand object being to let the breeze in, and keep the heat out. Shade is the universal desideratum. Every auberge has its huge remise—a vast, gloomy shed, into which carts and diligences drive, where the mangers of the horses stand, and where you will often see the carriers stretched out asleep. In large, messagerie hotels, these remises, ponderously built of vast blocks of stone, look like enormous catacombs, or vaults; and the stamping and neighing of the horses, and the rumbling of entering and departing vehicles, roll along the roof in thunder.
Near Beziers, I came upon a good specimen of the South of France bourg, or agricultural village. Seen from a little distance, it had quite an imposing appearance—the white, commodious-looking mansions gleaming cheerily out through the dusky olive-grounds. A closer inspection, however, showed the real nakedness of the land. The high, white mansions became great clumsy barns—the lower stories occupied as living places, the windows above bursting with loads of hay and straw. The crooked, devious streets were paved with filthy heaps of litter and dung. Dilapidated ploughs and harrows—their wooden teeth worn down to the stumps—lay hither and thither round the great gaunt, unpainted doorways. The window-shutters of every occupied room were shut as closely as port-holes in a gale of wind, and here and there a wandering pig or donkey, or a slatternly woman sifting corn upon a piece of sacking stretched before her door, or a purblind old crone knitting in the sun, formed the only moving objects which gave life to the dreary picture.
In this village, however, dreary as it was, I found a café and a billiard-table. Where, indeed, in France will you not? Except in the merest jumble of hovels, you can hardly traverse a hamlet without seeing the crossed cues and balls figuring on a gaily painted house. You may not be able to purchase the most ordinary articles a traveller requires, but you can always have a game at pool. I have frequently found billiard-rooms in filthy little hamlets, inhabited entirely by persons of the rank of English agricultural labourers. At home, we associate the game with great towns, and, perhaps, with the more dissipated portion of the life of great towns. Here, even with the thoroughly rustic portion of the population, the game seems a necessary of life. And there are, too—contrary to what might have been expected—few or no make-shift-looking, trumpery tables. The cafés in the Palais Royal, or in the fashionable Boulevards, contain no pieces of furniture of this description more massive or more elaborately carved and adorned than many I have met with in places hardly aspiring to the rank of villages. It has often struck me, that the billiard-table must have cost at least as much as the house in which it was erected; but the thing seemed indispensable, and there it was in busy use all day long. A correct return of the number of billiard-tables in France would give some very significant statistics relative to the social customs and lives of our merry neighbours. It would be an odd indication of the habits of the people, should there be found to be five times as many billiard-tables in France as there are mangles; and I for one firmly believe that such would be the result of an impartial perquisition. Besides the billard and the newspapers—little provincial rags, with which an English grocer would scorn to wrap up an ounce of pigtail—there are, of course, cards and dominoes for the frequenters; and they are in as great requisition all day as the balls and cues. I like—no man likes better—to see the toilers of the world released from their labours, and enjoying themselves; but after all there is something, to English ways of thinking, desperately idle in the scene of a couple of big, burly working men, sitting in the glare of the sunlight the best part of the day, wrangling over a greasy pack of cards, or rattling dominoes upon the little marble tables. I once remarked this to an old French gentleman.
"True—too true," he replied; "it was Bonaparte did the mischief. He made—you know how great a proportion of the country youth of France—soldiers. When they returned—those who did return—they had garrison tastes and barrack habits; and those tastes and habits it was which have brought matters to the pass, that you can hardly travel a league, even in rural France, without hearing the click of the billiard balls."
I left Beziers for the Mediterranean, by Pierre Paul Riquet's canal. The track-boat passes once a-day, taking upwards of thirty-five hours to make the passage from Toulouse to Cette. The Beziers station is about a mile from the town; and on approaching it early in the morning, I found a crowd of people collected on the banks, looking at men dragging the canal with huge hooks at the end of poles. They were searching for the body of a poor fellow from Beziers, who had drowned himself under very remarkable circumstances; and just as the packet-boat came up, the corpse was raised, stark and stiff, almost from beneath it. The deceased was a decrotteur, or boot-cleaner, and a light porter at Beziers—a quiet, inoffensive man, who, by dint of untiring industry, and great self-denial, had scraped together upwards of two hundred and fifty francs, all of which he lent another decrotteur, without taking legal security for the money. After the stipulated term for the loan had elapsed, the poor lender naturally pressed for his cash. He was put off from month to month with excuses; and when, at length, he became urgent for repayment, the debtor laughed in his face, told him to do his best and his worst, and get his money how he could. The decrotteur went away in a state of frenzy, and procured and charged a pistol, with which he returned to the rascal borrower.
"Will you pay me?—ay or no?" he said.
"No," replied the other; "go about your business."
The creditor instantly levelled his pistol and fired. Down went his antagonist, doubled up in a heap on the road, and away went the assassin as hard as his legs could carry him, to a bridge leading over the canal, from the parapet of which he leaped into the water; while, as he disappeared, the quasi murdered man got up again, with no other damage than a face blackened by the explosion of the pistol. He had fallen through terror, for he was absolutely unscathed.
The travelling by the Canal du Midi is a sleepy and monotonous business enough. Mile after mile, and league after league, the boat is gliding along between grassy or rushy banks, and rows of poplar, and sometimes of acacia trees, the monotonous tramp of the team upon the bank mingling with the endless gurgle of the waters beneath. The towing paths are generally very lifeless. Now and then a solitary peasant, with his heavy sharp-pointed hoe—an implement, in fact, half hoe and half pick-axe—upon his shoulder, saunters up to see the boat go by; or a shepherd, whistling to his flock, paces slowly at their head, wandering to and fro in search of the greenest bits of pasture; or a handful of jabbering women, from some neighbouring bourg, will be squatted along the water's edge, certainly not obeying Napoleon's injunction to wash their linge sale en famille, but pounding away at sheets and shirts with heavy stones or wooden mallets—the counterparts of the instruments used in Scotland to "get up" fine linen, and there called "beetles." The bridges are shot cleverly. At a shout from the steersman, the postillion, who rides one of the hindmost horses of the team, jumps off, casts loose the tow-line, runs with the end of it to the centre of the bridge, drops it aboard as the boat comes beneath, catches it up again on the opposite side, flies back after his horses which have trotted very tranquilly ahead, hooks on the rope again, jumps into his saddle, cracks his long whip, and the boat is off again in full career long ere she has lost her former headway. Little of the country can be seen from the deck, but along the southern and eastern half of the canal you seldom lose sight of the dusty tops of the formal olive groves, varied now and then by a stony slope covered with ugly, sprawling vines, and as you approach the sea, dotted with white, little country houses—of which more hereafter—the glimpses of the changing picture being continually set in a brown frame of sterile hills.
The boats are long and narrow; the cabins like corridors, but comfortably cushioned and stuffed, so that you can sleep in them, even if the boat be tolerably crowded, as well as in a diligence. If there be few passengers, you will have full-length room. The restaurant on board is excellent—as good as that on the Garonne boats, and very cheap. Let all English travellers, however, beware of the steward's department on the Loire and Rhone steamers, in both of which I have been thoroughly swindled. The style of people who seemingly use the track-boat on the Canal du Midi, are the rotonde class of diligence passengers. Going down to Cette, there were two or three families, almost entirely composed of females, aboard; the elder ladies—horrid, snuffy old women, who were always having exclusive cups of chocolate or coffee, or little basins of soup, and who never appeared to move from the spots on which they were deposited since the voyage began.
Two of these families had canaries in cages, a very common practice in France, where the people continually try, even in travelling, to keep their household gods about them. Look at the baggage of your Frenchman en voyage. All the old clothes of the last dozen of years are sure to be lugged about in it. There is, perhaps, a pormanteau, exclusively devoted to old boots, and half-a-dozen pasteboard hat-boxes, with half-a-dozen hats, utterly beyond wearing. The plague of all this baggage is dreadful; but the proprietor would go through any amount of inconvenience rather than lose one stitch of his innumerable old hardes.
After passing the headland and dull old town of Agde, the former crowned by the lighthouse I had seen from the road to Beziers, we fairly entered into the great zone of salt swamps which here line the Mediterranean. It was a desolate and dreary prospect. The land on either side stretched away in a dead flat; now dry and parched, again traversed by green streaks of swamp, and anon broken by clear, shallow pools of water. Sometimes, again, you entered a perfect jungle of huge bulrushes, stretching away as far as the eye could follow, and evidently teeming with wild ducks, which rose in vast coveys, and flew landward or seaward in their usual wedge-shaped order of flight. The sea, to which we were approaching at a sharp angle, was still invisible, but you felt the refreshing savour of the brine in the air, and now and then you caught, sparkling for a moment in the bright, hot sunshine, a distant jet of feathery spray, as a heavier wave than common came thundering along the beach. Presently, the brown waste through which we were passing became streaked with whitish belts and patches—the salt left by the evaporation of the brine, which now begins to soak and well through the spongy soil, and presently to expand into lakes and shallow belts of water. Across these, long rows of stakes for nets, stretched away in endless column, and here and there a rude, light boat floated, or a fisherman slowly waded from point to point. Great herons and cranes stood like sentinels in the shallow water, and flocks of sandpipers and plovers ran along the white salt-powdered sand. Then came on the left, or landward side, a series of tumuli of pyramidical form, some of them white, others of a dark brown, scattered over a space of scores of square miles. I wondered who were the inhabitants of this lake of the dismal swamp, and accordingly pointed out the houses, as I conceived them, to the captain.
"Houses, monsieur!" he said; "these are all salt heaps. Salt is the harvest of this country, and they stack it in these piles, just as the people inland do their corn. When the heap is not expected to be wanted soon, they thatch it with reeds and grass; but if they expect to get a quick sale, they don't take the trouble. So you see that some of the heaps are dark, and the others like snow-balls."
"But if there come rain?"
"Not much fear of that in this part of the world. There may be a shower, but the salt is so hard and compacted, that it will do little more than wash the dirt off."