Read Ebook: The fields of France by Robinson A Mary F Agnes Mary Frances Macdougall W B William Brown Illustrator

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

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

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

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

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

"Como jious lo cenre uno cato, Per Toutchion, mai des couots pus l?u. Nostro bi?lho Oubergno s'ocato Jious uno flessado de n?u"

. Adieu, lark and swallow! Poor cicada, perish in thy frozen hole! No more flowers, no more birds, save the great croaking crows that flap across the milk-white fields. Winter is here!

A MANOR IN TOURAINE A MANOR IN TOURAINE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life in the upper class has little changed in Gallia! We find, indeed, a greater difference if we compare our modern round of days and works with the picture offered in the Victorial. In 1406 , the chateau of S?rifontaine was no less hospitable than Lucaniacus, "and as well mounted," says the chronicler, "as any mansion in Paris;" the pleasures of hunting and shooting, the extreme love and exquisite practice of music, the light and almost constant art of conversation were alike in the one as in the other. There is the same delightful courtesy, the same universal amiability of temper. But in the mediaeval picture there is, perhaps , a lack of that sober, solid culture, that fund of judgment and good sense so oddly mixed with triviality, which in the days of Ausonius, as in our own, seem to me distinctive of society in France.

Even as the dice-tables and trictrac stood ready of old for the guests of Lucaniacus, so in every French country house to-day there is an orgy of innocent card-playing--such mysteries of Chinese b?zique, boston, bridge , or immense and complicated patiences which take five packs of cards. Meanwhile, I sit in a corner, very quiet, lost in a volume of Balzac, and a sweet ag?d voice calls to me: "Quelle triste vieillesse vous vous pr?parez, mon enfant!" Ah, sweet ag?d voice that I shall never hear again, your echo rings still for me in all the rooms of the Commanderie!

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

THE FRENCH PEASANT, BEFORE AND SINCE THE REVOLUTION

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

"'Now God be with you, fair brother,' said Aucassin.

"'God bless you,' replied the peasant hind.

"'And what do you here, for the love of God?' said Aucassin.

"'What's that to you?' said the other.

"'Nothing,' said Aucassin. 'I spoke out of courtesy.'

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

"'Bah! Do you know who I am?' said Aucassin.

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

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

"'Why, brother?'

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

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

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

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

"'Now look,' said Aucassin; 'here is the money in my purse; take it and pay the fine.'

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

"Deux grands boeufs blancs marqu?s de roux,"

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

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

"They also serve who only stand and wait."

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

"Et d'un vieux tronc pourri de votre m?tairie Vous faites dans le monde un nom de seigneurie.

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