BETWEEN BILLY AND BESSEY
To those tourists who are looking for out-of-the-way corners of Europe I
commend Billy. It is not pronounced in our frivolous way, but "Bee-yee,"
which you see gives it at once the French dignity. I call Billy
"out-of-the-way" because we saw no tourists in the neighborhood, and we
had never before heard of the place, which has a bare three-line mention
in Baedeker.
Billy is on the Allier, a beautiful river, and, seen from a distance,
with its towering ruin, is truly picturesque. Of course the old castle
is the chief feature of Billy--a ruin of great extent, and unrestored!
The last item alone makes it worth seeing. A good many of the ruins of
France have been restored under the direction of that great recreator of
the architectural past, Viollet le Duc, who has done his work supremely
well and thoroughly--oh, thoroughly, no name! I am glad he did it, for
it means preservation for the ages, but I am so glad that there is now
and then a ruin that
Monsieur V. le Duc
Happened to overlook.
I even drift into bad poetry when I think of it.
The Chateau de Billy seems to have been built about 1232 by one of the
sires of Bourbon Robert of Clermont, son of St. Louis, to control the
river traffic. It was a massive edifice of towers and bastions, and
walls of enormous thickness. A good portion of the walls and some of the
towers still stand. And there is a dungeon into which no light or air
could come, once used to convince refractory opposition. They put a man
in there for an hour. When they took him out he was either convinced or
dead, and so, in either case, no longer troublesome.
The guardian of Billy was a little old woman as picturesque as the
ruins, and lived in a little house across the way, as picturesque as
herself. When we had seen the castle she let us look into her house. It
consisted of just one small room with a tiny stove in one corner and a
bed in the other. But the stove, with its accessories of pans and other
ware all so shining and neat, and her tiny, high-posted, canopied bed so
spotless and pretty with its white counterpane and gay little curtains,
set us to wondering why anybody in the world needed a home more ample or
attractive than that.
It seemed amusing to us that the name of the next place along that route
should be Bessey. We lunched between Billy and Bessey, on a green level
roadside, under some big trees, where there was a little stream which
furnished our cooking water. It is not always easy to select the
luncheon place. A dry spot with water and shade is not everywhere to be
had, and then we do not always instantly agree on the conveniences of a
place, and while we are discussing it we are going right along at a
fifteen or twenty-mile rate and that place has drifted a mile or two
behind before the conference ends. But there always _is_ a place
somewhere that has most of the things we want, and it lies around the
next turn or over the next hill, and it is always so new and strange and
foreign, so away and away from the world we have known, so intimately a
part of a land and of lives we have never seen before and shall never
see again.
A gypsy of very poor class came along while we were at luncheon. His
little wagon-house was quite bare of furnishings. The man walked outside
beside the meager donkey--a young woman with a baby sat on the floor in
the wagon.
Gypsies, by the way, are an institution in France. The French call them
_nomades_, and provide them with special ordinances and road
limitations. At first, when we saw signs "_Limites de Nomades_" in the
outskirts of villages we wondered what was meant, and did not associate
the notice with the comfortable and sometimes luxurious house-wagons
that we met or overtook, or found solidly established by some pleasant
waterside. Then it dawned upon us that these gypsy folk were the
_nomades_ and that the signs were provided for their instruction.
We met them, presently, everywhere. France, with its level roads and
liberal laws, is gypsy heaven. A house on wheels, a regular little flat,
with parlor, bedroom and kitchen, big enough to hold a family and its
belongings, can be drawn by a single horse over the hard, perfectly
graded highways. They work north in the summer, no doubt, and in the
autumn the Midi calls them. Every little way we saw them camped,
working at their basketry or some kindred industry. Not all the villages
limit them, and often we found them located in the midst of a busy town.
I do not think they do any harm, and I always envied them. Some of their
little houses are so cozy and neat, with tiny lace curtains and flower
pots, and pictures on the walls. When we first saw such wagons we
thought they belonged to artists.