ourselves and look about us critically, as the smoky little tender
bore us up the wide channel of the Gironde from Pauillac, where our
ship bound for South America had contemptuously dropped us, to
Bordeaux itself. A little below the city, the Gironde, which is really
the estuary of the Garonne and Dordogne, shrinks to the Garonne pure
and simple, but under either name it seems equally a waste of turbid
clay-laden waters. On our left hand a bright sun--the month was
November--shone warmly on a line of low hills, formed of reddish
earth, and broken by great marl quarries. Woods climbed about these,
and here and there a village or a little town nestled under them. On
our right the bank lay low, and was fringed with willows, the country
behind it being flattish, planted as it seemed to us with dead
thorn-bushes, and dotted sparely with modern castellated houses.
Nevertheless it was towards this modest, almost dreary landscape
that we gazed; it was of it we all spoke, and to it referred, as we
named names famous as Austerlitz or Waterloo, names familiar in our
mouths--and our butlers'--as household words. For are not more people
versed in claret than in history? And this commonplace landscape, this
western bank of the Gironde, a mere peninsula lying between the river
and the low Atlantic coast, is called Medoc, and embraces all the
best known Bordeaux vineyards in the world. It seems as if a single
parish--say St. George's, Hanover Square, for that is a big one--might
hold them all. There, see, is Chateau Lafitte. The vineyards of St.
Estephe and St. Julien we have just passed. Leoville and Latour are
not far off. And now we are passing the Chateau of Margaux itself, and
gaining experience, are beginning to learn that all those little
thorn-bushes stuck about the fallows, as though to protect the
ground-game from poachers' nets, are vines--vines of the _premier
cru!_ The vintage is over. The grapes, black, sour things, about the
size of currants, have all been picked. Where we had looked to see the
endless interlacings of greenery, and swelling clusters dropping
fatness on a carpet of turf, we find only reddish fallows, and rows of
dead gooseberry bushes.
But never mind, even though this be but the first of many
disillusions, and though the "sunny south" become hourly a more
humorous catchword. To-day the sun _is_ warm, the breeze is soft, the
custom-house officers are civil. We air--but with the caution due to
convalescents, or those of tender years--our shaky, tottering French,
and get English answers. So we stride across the broad quays of
Bordeaux, our hearts before us, our luggage behind, and ourselves in
the best of spirits and tempers.
Bordeaux, as we saw it, was a cheerful, busy city, full of wide
streets and open spaces and handsome buildings; a bright clean, airy,
city with little smoke, an immense water frontage, and one very fine
bridge: a pleasant etherealized Liverpool, in fact. The white blouses
and blue trousers of the workmen, the soldiers' uniforms, the bare
heads of some women and the gay 'kerchiefs, worn chignon-wise, of
others, gave picturesqueness to the crowds circling about the
kiosques, and reminded us, from time to time, that we were in a
southern city. Not unnecessarily; for the thermometer fell on the day
after our arrival to fifty degrees; and rain fell too, and we were
quick to discover the true cause of French vivacity. The French have
no fires at home. Consequently, when it is cold--and it often is very
cold, even as far South as Bordeaux--their only resource is to go out,
and jump about in such faint sunshine as they can find, and so make
believe to be warm. Every one in Bordeaux seemed to be doing this that
day.
We saw a number of churches, but I have jumbled them together in my
mind, and dare not distinguish between the beauties of St. Seurin and
St. Croix, St. Michel or the Cathedral. Only I attended a service on
Sunday morning, and, having heard that no Frenchmen now went to
church, noted with interest that of a large congregation one in every
four was a man. But then Bordeaux is perhaps the most orthodox city in
France, and primitive ideas, good and bad, still prevail in this
southwestern province, peopled by descendants of the Huguenots and
Albigenses, by devout Basques and simple Navarrese. And two things
also in Bordeaux I remember--the semi-circular remains of a Roman
amphitheatre, which no one visiting Bordeaux should omit to see; and,
secondly, a lofty, detached spire of singular lightness and grace. It
is called the Peyberland, and was built by Pierre Berland, who must
have been an English subject.
His name strikes the vein of thought which was uppermost in my mind at
Bordeaux. I found it impossible to forget that it had been for three
centuries a half English city, and the capital of a half English
province, ruled by an English king; or that up the wide Gironde,
between the marly banks, Edward the Black Prince must many a time have
sailed in state. Sir John Chandos and Sir Walter Manny, and many
another English worthy, knew these streets as well as they knew
Eastcheap or Aldgate. John of Gaunt and Talbot of Shrewsbury dwelt
here, as much at home and at their ease as in York or Leicester. It is
impossible not to wonder at those old Englishmen; not to think of them
with pride, as we remember how firmly, the roving blood of Dane and
Norman young in their veins, they grasped this prize; how long they
clung to it, how boldly they flaunted the French lilies in the eyes of
France; how cheerfully they crowded year by year to cross the bay in
open boats! And then what cosmopolitans they were, with their manors
in Devon and Aquitane, their houses in London and Bordeaux; with
perhaps a snug little box at Calais, and a farm or two in Maine. How
trippingly French and Provencal, and the rougher English, passed over
their tongues. They founded no empire--on the contrary they lost one.
But they were the immediate ancestors of Elizabeth's sea-dogs, for all
that. In holding Guienne through those three centuries their strength
was wasted. When they lost it (1451), they turned upon one another,
and the Wars of the Roses took up half a century. After that they
needed half-a-century's holiday to recruit themselves; and then out
flashed the Vikings' spirit again--this time to better purpose--and
under Drake and Grenville and Hawkins, they, the men of Poitiers and
Sluys, made the greater England.
Even in Bordeaux they have left some traces of their work. They built
this cathedral which stands here, in the third city of France. Their
leopards are not yet effaced from the walls of yonder castle. Their
dogs--_les dogues des Anglais_, our waiter dubbed them, on seeing us
fondle them--play about the streets, and sniff with a special
friendliness at English calves. Indeed, I never saw such a place for
bull-dogs--chiefly brindled ones--as Bordeaux. We drank a toast after
dinner the evening before we left. It was, _Les dogues des Anglais!_
Bordeaux, being like London too high on the river to get the
sea-breeze, has its Brighton at Arcachon. To reach the latter from the
city, a railway passes some thirty miles westward across a tract of
light, sandy soil, thinly clothed with woods. As you glide through
these, now in sunshine, now in shade, you catch a glimpse here and
there of clearings and wooden shanties, and groups of peasants leaning
on axes. Then, scarcely descending, you find yourself on the seashore,
with the Bay of Biscay before you. Nearer, a basin of deepest blue,
almost cut off from the outer sea by a reef of the dunes, forms a
glorified harbor. Along this basin runs a broad beach, backed by a row
of magnificent hotels with spacious terraces; and behind these lie two
or three streets of rather paltry shops and restaurants. Having seen
all this--the _plage_, the hotels, the terraces, the streets--you
fancy you have seen Arcachon, and are inclined to be disappointed. But
this is not Arcachon proper, which lies at the back of all this, and
at the back even of that fairy-like Casino that rises on the abrupt
slope of the sand-dunes behind us, and seemed the rear of all things.
For on the land-side of the Casino is a forest of pines and larches,
wild, far stretching, and apparently illimitable: a forest that is
perpetually running up one sand-hill and down another, as if it were
trying to get a view of the sea, and were not easily satisfied. And
amid the vivid greens and dull blues of the foliage, glitter here and
there and everywhere the daintiest of Swiss chalets or Indian
bungalows, bright boxes of wood and stucco, colored and painted, and
fretted and carved so delicately that one would infer that rain never
fell here; or else that these were not intended for out-of-door wear.
Mere toys they seem, set in smooth lawns. Flowers glow about them, and
the scent of the pines is everywhere, and everywhere are shady aisles
of trees hung with white mosses, and leading into the gloom of the
forest. Nature and luxury have come together here; the result is
that soft, languid, southern beauty, Mademoiselle Arcachon--of the
Theatre des Folies Bordelaises. Yet is her constitution tolerably
strong--thanks to the Atlantic breezes, though the sun was bright on
the day we visited her, the wind was cold and the thermometer scarcely
above forty degrees. This in early November.
The next evening saw us enter a very different place in a different
way. For leaving Bordeaux we reached La Reole on foot and at dusk,
welcomed only by the fantastic rays of a few swinging oil lamps. La
Reole is the antipodes to Arcachon. It is a small, ancient town,
which, small as it is, has a great place in Froissart and Davila, and
still frowns bravely down upon the rich plain of the Garonne. It
stands on a steep, cloven hill that rises sheer from the wide, yellow,
rush-bordered river about forty miles above Bordeaux. On the crest
above the Garonne stands a castle once English, and in size and
position not unlike that at Chepstow. Beside it are a church, a modern
chateau, and a _place_ of modern houses. Upon the second crest, and in
the cleft between the two, are huddled together the steep alleys and
crazy tottering houses, all corners and gables, of the old town. A
stream on which are several mills pours through the ravine, being
overhung by tall, delapidated houses of three stories, with as many
sets of wooden balconies and outside stairs. One might almost step
across the water from one balcony to another, so much do the houses
bulge. We took infinite delight in the old-world quaintness of this
scene, in the air of decay that hung about all things, in the
crumbling coats of arms, the wavy, tiled roofs, the sinking houses,
the swinging lanterns; above all in the gray walls of the castle,
brightened here and there by the pure discs of a rose bush, or the
green of ivy.
Froissart has a very pretty story--and a strange story too--to tell of
La Reole. He says that Sir Walter Manny being with the English
besieging it, "was reminded of his father;" that he had heard in his
infancy that he had been buried there, or in that neighborhood. (Is
there not a pleasant smack about that "was reminded of," and that
dubious "he had heard in his infancy"?) The elder Manny, the
chronicler explains, had unluckily wounded to death in a tournament at
Cambray a Gascon knight; and by way of penance had agreed to go on a
pilgrimage to the shrine of St. James of Compostella, at Santiago in
Spain. On his return he passed near La Reole, and hearing that the
brother of the King of France was besieging it, stayed to visit him;
and going home one night from the royal hotel to his lodgings, was
waylaid and murdered. The Gascon's kinsmen were strongly suspected of
the foul deed; but they were powerful, "and none took the part of the
Lord of Manny." So he was buried in a small chapel outside La Reole;
and was almost forgotten when his son, being in the neighborhood,
raked up the old story, and offered a reward of a hundred crowns to
any one who could show him the grave. This an old man volunteered to
do, and took Sir Walter to a tomb which was further identified by a
Latin inscription. Thereupon, the son, as pious as brave--a subject of
Queen Philippa of Hainault, I fear, and not a trueborn Englishman,
though he died in London, was buried in the Charter House, and left
his lands "on either side of the sea" to the Earl of Pembroke--had the
remains conveyed to Valenciennes in Hainault, and buried there.
And so the story ends. But is it not a quaint and pretty story, and
does it not smack of the times when the knight errant was one day
tourneying at Cambray, and the next kneeling at Santiago, and on the
third was waylaid at La Reole? And does it not plaintively suggest
how, after long days of waiting, the news, still dim and uncertain,
came through to the quiet castle in Hainault, news so dim, so
uncertain, that the good son, when chance brought him to the scene of
his father's death, could but faintly remember that it had happened
there or thereabouts?
We seemed to be for a few days in a world of dying things. If La Reole
was old and decadent, and showed few signs of former strength, the
next place to which we came was still farther gone in decay. Port St.
Marie is a straggling town lying low in a bend of the river. Most of
its houses--they are large, with heavy doorways--are built in
frameworks of wood after the style of our black and white houses, and
have the spaces between the beams filled with bricks; long, thin
bricks of close texture and the old Roman shape, set sometimes on end,
sometimes lengthwise, more often aslant; any way so that they may fill
the interstices. A large number of these houses are of three stories;
and each upper story projecting two or three feet beyond the one below
it, the buildings seem really nodding to their fall. Many were empty,
with unglazed windows, and flapping shutters, and sinking corners; and
yet the stout timbers, seasoned perhaps when Simon de Montfort was
governor of Guienne and had his court in Bordeaux, held together, and
bound up the crumbling clay. Above one door ran the legend "_Le
Couronne dut devoir_," a sufficiently chivalrous motto. Above others
were battered stone shields. On all was the stamp of assured ruin.
Neglect and poverty were written large everywhere. Time had touched
the place with no caressing hand, such as
Makes old bareness picturesque,
And tufts with grass a feudal tower,
but with mean and sordid fingers; and the result was pitifully dreary.
It made our hearts ache. The very people we saw in the streets looked
pallid and hopeless, like people going down the hill. Such a town, so
desolate, so moribund, does not exist, thank heaven, in our more
populous England. Yet in our way we enjoyed it. We gloated with
something of the zest of ghouls over its decay, until having cloyed
our souls with sadness, we got hurriedly away into the sunshine and
the fields, where the patient, fawn-colored oxen were dragging the
plough, and the countryman stood leaning on his goad to see us pass
between the rows of poplars. No doubt he thought us mad to be toiling
out of St. Marie with our faces set countrywards, when no great
distance off lay the railway, which would take us in a few hours to
Bordeaux, to the delights of cafe and boulevard. "Oh! but they are
droll, these English!"
Any one leaving St. Marie must remark a singular, conical hill which
rises abruptly from the plain before him. It is topped by a wooden
steeple, while the dark outlines of walls and towers form a crown
about its summit, and a row of cypresses rising solemnly above the
lower buildings impart something of mystery to the place. It seemed to
me like nothing so much as Mont St. Michel. In vain we ransacked our
guide books. We could find no word of this fortress town which looked
down on road and river; only in our map we discovered that its name
was Clermont Dessus. Nothing daunted, however, we discovered a field
path, and, climbing the hill, passed through a ruined gateway into the
silence of the place. On three sides the walls were yet fairly
perfect, and within them stood some fifty houses, many in ruins, more
empty, a few inhabited. The floor of one was on a level with the roof
of another, and the only means of access was by steep, tortuous
alleys. The church had been partially restored, but was old and still
bore marks of violent usage. The graveyard on a terrace displayed
twenty-four cypresses, and an ancient stone cross. Above all this rose
the ruins of a castle, smaller than that at La Reole and with traces
of more recent occupation. Woodwork and iron still remained adhering
to the walls. What, we wondered, had been its history. A few women and
children were the only human creatures it held, and we could gather
nothing from them save that it belonged, or had belonged, to the
"Seigneur." For our climb, however, we felt amply rewarded by the view
over the valley of the Garonne, and so ran quickly down the hill and
stepped out stubbornly for Agen, which we reached after twice losing
our way through a too ardent desire to cling to a pleasant green path
by the river.
It was dark when, footsore and tired, we gained the principal street;
and we failed to discover our hotel. "Would you direct us to the Hotel
de St. Jean?" I asked a decent-looking man who was passing.
"How, monsieur?" he replied, after so long a pause that I feared he
did not understand me; "the Hotel de St. Jean no longer exists. It has
been closed a year and more."
We looked at each other in silent disgust; and he looked at us. We
were fairly tired out. "Would you have the kindness, then, to tell us
which is the best hotel?" I said with resignation.
"I will conduct you to the Hotel de St.----," he answered, quickly.
"It is an hotel of the first class."
But when I saw the Hotel de St. ----, we knew him for a swindler. It
was a miserable place, and we would have none of it. We courteously
said that we did not like it. He insisted. We broke away from him, and
in a few minutes came upon the Hotel de St. Jean, its doors open to
welcome us, and the light pouring ruddily from its windows. The story
is trivial: I tell it because it was my ill-luck more than once to
fall into the hands of this kind of tout, and be deceived by the tale
that the house to which I had been advised to go was shut. On one
occasion, at Guelmah, in Algeria, I was lured while inquiring for the
Hotel d'Orient into the Hotel Auriol, a miserable place. In the
morning I looked out of my window, and to my astonishment saw the name
of the hotel in which I believed myself to be staring me in the face,
painted up in large letters over the door of a house on the farther
side of the square. I rubbed my eyes and wondered, and it was not
until I stood in the open, and read the name of one and the other,
that I recognized with a hearty laugh how I had been taken in.
From Agen, on a fine, sunny morning, we went by rail to Moissac. Here,
attached to the church, is the most delightful cloister in the world,
a cloister rich in arches and capitals of delicate tracery poised on
slender shafts, and half hidden by luxuriant creepers, through which
the light falls soft and green-tinged, as in some sea-grotto. It is a
place for rest and reflection, perfectly adapted to a hot climate;
whereas, he who has only seen the dull, dank portico enclosing danker
grave-stones, the play-ground of cats--which in England we call a
cloister--does not know what the thing is. This church boasted also a
quaint doorway enriched with the more or less coarse designs in which
the monks of yore took pleasure: a doorway reputed to be one of the
most curious in France.
From Moissac we went on foot to Castel Sarrasin, sometimes by the
Tarn, but for the most part by the side of the great canal; and
always, whether by the latter or the river, moving in a soft symphony
of various greens, green streams, green poplars--and oh! such vistas
of them!--green willows, green banks--all mingled together and fading
into one another, and harmoniously blending as the evening fell with
the pale pea-green of the eastern sky. It was a peaceful and silent
walk through a world of restful hues.
From Castel Sarrasin, once no doubt a stronghold of the Moors, to
Montauban we went by train. Montauban, on the Tarn, is a busy place,
but a picturesque one also. Standing on a rough, steep hill, the town
is seamed and cleft by strange, deep valleys with precipitous sides.
Crazy houses with roofs of tiles, so time-stained that they have the
precise appearance of strips of bark, fill these ravines and lean
against their walls. Gardens cling to the ledges of the rocks. Shrubs
and flowers clothe the crannies. Wooden balconies hang everywhere--and
clothes-lines. We were there on market-day, and watched with amusement
the teams of oxen--all fawn-colored--coming in for sale, or dragging
into town the lumbering carts (much like timber-wagons, with boxes
about the middle) in which Madame sat with her produce about her.
Monsieur walked before the oxen, his goad on his shoulder, and a white
nightcap on his head. Oxen push, they do not pull. They shove inwards
against one another, the near legs of the near ox and the off legs of
the off ox being protruded at a considerable angle to get a good
purchase. Very frequently only the feet so used are shod. The driver
always goes before them, and as they follow with lowered heads, they
are perfect images of patient resignation.
An old farmer, stout and jolly-looking, presently met us loitering on
the bridge, and after a long period of staring, spoke to us. "Are you
Germans?" he asked.
"No," I replied with courteous determination, "we are English." He
still eyed us with some suspicion, and after a pause fell to
questioning us about our country. Had we bread, and what kind of
bread? had we any railways?
"Yes," I answered proudly to this last, "we have trains that travel at
the rate of a hundred _kilometres_ an hour!" A trifling exaggeration
it may be, but human and pardonable.
He gravely nodded his head, however, as if he believed it, and meant
to pose his wife and neighbors with it when he reached home. "You have
grapes and wine?" he continued.
"We grow grapes under glass," I explained, "in glass houses. In the
open air it is generally too cold for them."
"What!" he exclaimed, his jovial face clouding over as it occurred to
him that I was not in earnest. "Will you kindly say that again?"
I did as he wished. But when I had made the matter as clear as I
could, he answered stoutly, "No! It is impossible! Either I do not
understand you, or you do not understand me!" And he went on his way
in a passion. He could believe in the Irish Mail; but the cultivation
of vines under glass was a thing outside his ideas of the world's
economy.
From the _place_ at Montauban, an open space pleasantly laid out on
the brow of the hill, it is said that the Pyrenees can be seen on a
fine day. We had a fine day, but we saw no sign of the mountains--our
land at Beulah--though we looked long and lingeringly.
Attracted by a name which seemed familiar to us, and had a ring about
it as of feudal and knightly times, we made a diversion from here to
Cahors on the Lot, an old city standing in a fertile basin, among
bare, brown hills. We were disappointed in the first appearance of the
town. The river still runs round three sides of it, but the ramparts
have been turned into gardens where they have not been levelled; only
one tower of the castle survives; and though there are some
picturesque houses, the town is for the most part modern, and devoted
to Gambetta who was born in it. The cathedral, surmounted by one heavy
tower, backed by three domes in a row, is imposing in its bulky
ugliness. Its floor is much lower than the marketplace without: so
that on entering through the west door you find a flight of steps
before you, and the congregation at your feet immersed in candlelit
gloom. These steps at the Sunday morning service were crowded by
kneeling hucksters and market-women with their baskets, who had
quietly entered as a matter of course from the market, which was in
full swing without, and were devoutly telling their beads, or
listening to a sermon preached by a bishop--a Count-Bishop, too, whose
pastoral ring was still a prominent feature in the scene, so skilfully
did he wave and display it. At Cahors we were much pleased with one of
the bridges, from which rise three Flemish-looking towers. They form
as many gateways, and from every point of view are singularly
picturesque. This bridge may have stood there in its present state
when Henry of Navarre did at Cahors his most famous deed. A strong
garrison was at the time holding the city for the Catholic party, but
Henry, smarting under the loss of La Reole, which had been betrayed by
its governor, determined to seize Cahors. Accordingly he came to it
with fourteen hundred men, and leaving one half of this force outside
to cover his night attack, blew in a gate with a petard and entered
with the rest, being himself the seventh to pass in. A furious battle
in the streets ensued, but when day broke, the Huguenots had mastered
a small part of the city only, and reinforcements for the enemy
arriving, Henry's followers begged him to retire. "No!" he answered,
fighting on with his back to a shop, "I will not retire! My only
retreat from this town shall be the retreat of my soul from my body!"
He kept his word. Street by street and house by house, he reduced the
town, neither side asking or giving quarter. But it was not until the
fifth night after his entrance that he completely mastered the place,
a feat which is generally allowed to stand highest among his warlike
exploits.