: The fields of France by Robinson A Mary F Agnes Mary Frances Macdougall W B William Brown Illustrator - France Social life and customs; France Social conditions; Peasants France

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A FARM IN THE CANTAL 1

A MANOR IN TOURAINE 45

THE FRENCH PEASANT 77

THE FORESTS OF THE OISE 133

A LITTLE TOUR IN PROVENCE 167

HOW THE POOR LIVED IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY 195

THE MEDIAEVAL COUNTRY HOUSE 239

A FARM IN THE CANTAL A FARM IN THE CANTAL

The farm lies in a wonderful country.

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

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

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

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